Andrew "K`Tetch" Norton’s Techdirt Profile

About Andrew "K`Tetch" Norton

I'm a P2P researcher, that also dabbles in Pirate Politics. I've worked in TV, for a record company, and dabble in particle physics on the Muon1 project.

I am also the assistant director of the EFForums track at Dragoncon (http://eff.dragoncon.org) and the co-editor of the book No Safe Harbor (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120912/11041420360/chatting-with-andrew-ktetch-norton-about-no-safe-harbors-techdirt-book-club-interview.shtml)

from the grab,-go-and-exaggerate dept

When it comes to regulatory enforcement, agencies are often at a loss to try and spin actions as somehow being positive. Often such seizures are seen as petty and overreaching acts focusing on business protectionism or the shutting down threats to tax revenue (permanently in some cases) by regular people, meaning that getting public support for them can be an uphill struggle. Alcohol taxes are so unpopular that it's the origin behind one of the most popular sports in the US – NASCAR. Thus it's tempting to try and upsell things by stretching claims beyond all credulity, as the UK's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) and Department of Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) departments did recently.

Facebook followers of the IPO were confronted with this story just recently:

"Campaign cracks down on toxic fake alcohol" screams the headline, with the comment that thousands of liters were seized in Operation OPSON (a name that looks like it was short for "operation poison"). A serious bust of dangerous goods clearly, and clearly the agencies are doing a great job protecting the country, so share it and back to cat pictures.

Or you could actually read the article itself, and find the story isn't quite as portrayed, and no cyanide-filled bottles cosplaying as spirituous liquors were annihilated by brave officials. For that matter, not only is OPSON not a veiled reference to poison, it's not even a priority. At the head of "notes to editors," Operation OPSON is described quite differently:

"Operation OPSON, jointly run by Interpol and Europol, began in 2011 to tackle the criminal production and sale of counterfeit 'protected food name' products, such as gorgonzola or champagne. It is now an international project that regularly sees the seizure of hundreds of tonnes of fake and substandard food."

That's right, international police agencies are running an operation to seize food not because they are bad, dangerous, or harmful, but because they weren't made in an approved locale. While some are fairly evident and obvious, such as lamb or beef labelled "scotch" or "welsh," others are less-so. A Cornish pasty made in Devon or Derbyshire isn't actually a Cornish pasty, because it wasn't made in Cornwall. Likewise if you were to make Feta cheese, you can't actually call it Feta, unless the sheep/goat milk came from Greece. Even Belgium has wanted in on the act for its chocolate industry.

The food is fake (and presumed sub-standard) not because it's not that food, but because the place that made it wasn't within a certain circle on a map, even if it's absolutely identical and indistinguishable from the same product made inside that circle. This was never more evident than in 2007, when the protections around "Newcastle Brown Ale" were lifted… because the Scottish & Newcastle brewery wanted to move outside the circle.

But what of the toxic alcohol seized by the gallon? Well, like the goods themselves, it's not what it appears. The 2,421.5 liters grabbed by authorities are in their own words mostly "...for fake or fiscal infringing wines and spirits." Not because they were dangerous, but because of tax evasion, or trademark violations. So where's the "toxic" issue in the headline?

The poison comes from a raid in Derbyshire, where:

"There was little of the finished product or the raw materials (Coolex screenwash) in the unit but a large quantity of bottles, tops and boxes."

Never mind, because:

"A small amount of the finished product was identified, and on examination was found to contain high levels of iso-propanol. Isopropyl Alcohol (IPA) causes intense drunkenness, is often used in cleaning chemicals."

The question is, was that actually the finished product, or one that was put aside because it had those high levels? Moreover, it's not exactly the most toxic, as the LD50 (lethal dose) for a rat orally is 5045 mg per kilogram. Compare with, say, ethanol ("good" alcohol), at 3450 mg per kilogram of mouse. Probably why even their expert, Visiting Professor at the University of Reading, Tony Hines had to say:

Not exactly "toxic" though, or all that different from regular booze, let's be fair. In fact, the major difference is that isopropyl alcohol is just more potent than ethanol. So, to drive home the seriousness of this, they close with the following paragraph.

"In 2012, methanol poisoning from fake vodka resulted in the deaths of 50 people in the Czech Republic. In 2014, 2 men were sentenced to life imprisonment for their part in this tragedy, and many others sentenced to 14 to 20 years for their part. Eighty survivors were blinded as a result of consuming the poison."

Not to be flippant about it (the incident has killed 51), but this was an incident that happened 30 months ago 1500 km away. It even used a different chemical (methanol), so its inclusion is completely irrelevant to the issues at hand, and is there solely to try and justify tax and trademark-based raids and seizures as being about safety, and pump up the "shareability" factor by giving them a excuse to hang "toxic" in the headline.

Now, don't get me wrong, tainted and unsafe goods are bad, there's no doubt about that. Yet if you're going to try and play up a safety angle, then you really have to have a safety problem to hang your hat on. The vodka made from screenwash might be disturbing to some, but "toxic fake alcohol" is pushing it, when even if every drop of vodka they seized (171.1 liters) that year were high in isopropyl alcohol, it's only 7% of the total seized. And yet we know they didn't grab anywhere near that amount, because more than 240 bottles of the stuff is hardly "little of the finished product," a description which would seem to me to indicate a dozen liters or less. And since they found only empties, it means it's already gone out, so they've not really "cracked down" on it either.

Overall, the only toxic thing seems to be the press release, and then only for any journalist sloppy enough to regurgitate it without bothering to read it. That's probably why, on Twitter, where pushback, feedback and replies are harder to bury, there's absolutely no mention of "toxic" at all.

That's because when it comes to poisonous, nothing beats hyperbolic government press releases for leaving good will stone dead.

Prohibition ended in 33, correct; bootlegging still continued afterwards, albeit not to the same level, yes. "Running Shine" still happened, with Bill France organising some races with the stock cars, until NASCAR started 67 years ago this coming Saturday (I live just down the road from AMS, number of friends with full-on Dale shrines, I've been lectured on NASCAR history more times than I can imagine)

I'm a Brit, I know the horsemeat scandal well. No-one died, most people never even noticed (not as surprising as you'd think, meat looks like meat on the whole) so it's not SO toxic. And everything can pass on toxins - see BSE/CJD.

As for Paprika having traces of nuts, well do you think the heat treatment planks, and the grinding mills etc. are ONLY used for Paprika? Plant I used to work at (evenings while at college) would run 13-ton a shift through single heat treatment unit, all hand-shoveled. They'd change all the time, and you could tell when they were going to do turmeric because they'd wear onsies to stop the staining, and damn the heat!Nut cross-contamination isn't as rare as you'd think. Especially as some nuts are not nuts (peanut's a legume)

A terrorist is someone who uses violence, or threat of violence, to [or attempt to] intimidate or cooerce societies to follow an ideological position which is usually political.

Saying 'you can't be a terrorist unless you belong to a terrorist organisation' is like saying 'you can't be a criminal unless you belong to a criminal organisation'. You don't suddenly become a terrorist when you need more than a minibus to get you around.

He has lots of convictions for violence, for attacking people based on their thoughts and beliefs, and prefaces them all with a justification based on his political ideology. That would fit him into the "terrorist" mold by pretty much any definition I've been able to find. Sure, he never blew anyone up, or shot them, but that's mostly because he's smart enough to know that never really works.

Is he a "terrorist" as most people would think of it? No. But then again, he's not really an 'activist' either. My experiences with him are more that he was a spoiled brat with minor aptitude in exploiting sql databases. However, instead of turning that to the hard, thankless work of actual activism, he acted like a spoiled brat, and now plays the Martyr card, because he isn't as smart as he thinks he is (the drug convictions alone should prove that!)

I'm reading the docs, and it seems like he was added to the screening center list in 03 (during his early days, when he was arrested at the RNC convention protests)

It also doesn't list his felony mob action conviction from 2010 (the announcing that Chicago wasn't getting the 2016 olympics - when he got home after being released, he was proud of is arrest, and the violence/damage he caused and openly boasted of it.

and it also doesn't mention the 04 battery conviction, or the 2010 'storming' of a restaurant as part of a masked group of 5 because he didn't like one of the people eating there's views.

He's without question a thug and an incredibly intolerant one at that. He's hit out at his victims for speaking out ("Snitches get stitches" is a favorite phrase of his), so is it really such a stretch that he should be on a list of people to watch?

He's not some innocent caught up in an overzealous dragnet, but precisely the kind of person these lists are designed to help monitor. That is to say, those that just don't care and have no hesitation to lash out at any they deem to be worthy of attack, because they don't share their views, or just because they dared to speak out against him.

No, they have an easy-to-understand motive. So easy to understand, in fact, that it's in the name.

Their motive is to make you be afraid. To either abandon your freedoms and liberties in a quixotic attempt to prevent these rare and selective acts from happening (what the western world has done for the last 15 years) or to give in so as to make them stop.

The other way to combat it is to not capitulate, and ignore it. To not give in to Terror, like Sarah turning to Jarrod and saying "you have no power over me".

I'm a little older than you (as I noted above, I was at the 93 Warrington bombing) and as a scouser, remember all of them only too well, but since 03 have lived in the US. there's been a definite change. Up until Major, British politicians were all about projecting power and confidence (well, as much as Major could) and that particular 'stiff-upper-lip-ness' that's quintessentially British.Tony though, listened to his advisors (like Rupert Murdoch, and Mandy) and knew that 'fear sells', and that by providing the fear, AND promising to deal with it, you can stay in office easier. It's the American way of dealing with it.

And shortly after 9/11, my (American) wife came back to the US to visit family, and then I had a job of my own in the US. I flew in to SF on Halloween, while there was a 'terror warning' on the 4 bay area bridges. There I saw firsthand the utterly useless, but panic-driven 'response', as I daily dealt with 3 of those bridges - I was staying in Sausalito, and we were filming on Treasure Island (yes, the same one as in Little Brother. we'd take the Richmond bridge way in the morning, and Golden Gate at night because of traffic flow) - and noted the military vehicles EVERYWHERE. They left an abandoned 2-ton box truck on the Bay bridge for more htan 3 hours after me and my driver reported it to the unit on the TI bridge exit (we could see it from the studio, and had put a spotter there just 'in case' - we had a lot of ROV's and safety gear and wanted to be sure we could go radio dark if needed)

I've rambled a bit, but the end result is, it's more profitable for politicians to sow fear, and then the solution, than to tell them to 'keep calm and carry on'. Anyone can tell you that, while only these politicians can 'deal' with the issues they themselves are creating.

“We are still shaken by what hit us, but we never give up our values. Our answer is more democracy, more openness and more humanity, but never naivete.”

(and for what it's worth, I not only grew up in Liverpool during the IRA attacks of the 80s and 90s, I very narrowly escaped injury in the 93 Warrington Bombing, which the Boston bombing was nearly a carbon copy of 20 years [and one month] later. Terrorism actually means something to me personally, it's not an abstract as for most people

I got hit with a bunch of questions over this, because I work the EFForums track at Dragoncon, which uses the Marriott Marquis, Hyatt Regency, Hilton Atlanta, Westin and Sheraton in downtown Atlanta. 60,000+ attendees all after wifi. Even SMS failed half the time in 2013, but the cellphone companies brought in a whole bunch of extra capacity for this year.

We run our own hotspots (including a wall-o-sheep, sponsored by DC404; and one based on a rasperry pi. Plus a connection for the space track to run their late-night live astronomy in Chile) and not noticed any issues. You can bet we'll be on the lookout for any issues.

I know I had a conversation with Gigi (https://twitter.com/GigiBSohnFCC/status/497534413354586113) and David Bray (https://twitter.com/fcc_cio/status/511685826208874497) about my comments not showing up on the system. Even now, search for "Andrew Norton" and you won't find it under that proceeding (you have to know the confirmation number to find it the second time I submitted it)